Tempting Isabel (Paradise South #1)

by Rissa Brahm

But, then, how did Isabel let it get physical during the event? On hotel grounds, no less? On the same damn floor, same wing as the wedding guests!

  No. She decided she wouldn’t stoop to explain herself, especially not over the phone. There was no way around sounding defensive, bordering on pathetic. Isabel had too much pride.

  Lucinda accepted the silent reply. “I just hung up with Stephanie Rine with Annette conferenced in. I, of course, would have hung up on both of them, since they are not the bride, but it was when they began threatening that they’d kill my business with horrendous reviews on all the wedding sites! And on and on. My contract protects Golden Rings from slander, but to defend and litigate it would cost more than the company’s worth. And legal doesn’t stop the irreparable damage of bad press. I have staff, contracts, my pending retirement hinges on all that I’ve built, Isabel!” Lucinda paused. And Isabel just shook her head at her end of the phone. Those horrid bitches.

  “The cardinal rule, Isabel! I just expected anything but this from you. Was the best man even worth it? No, don’t even answer that. It doesn’t matter anyway. They’ve agreed to sign a Covenant Not to Sue or Slander Agreement if I let you go. I’d have to release you anyway, since the entire office knows now. So”—Lucinda huffed—“for the benefit of my company…Isabel Ruiz, your services are no longer needed. Goodbye.”

  Isabel sat there on her back deck, phone still at her ear, but the only sound left to hear was that of the tide rushing in. With a blank mind and a frozen stare out at the water, she had no tears. She was just too numb to even cry. Her jaw tightened. She reached across the table for the bottle of coconut wine. Fuck. She forgot it was empty. Just bone fucking dry.

  CHAPTER 47

  His eyes blinked.

  “Oh, thank heaven!” he heard his mother’s voice cry. Then he heard medical terms being exchanged between two others in the room. And saw the time on a wall clock through his haze…4:23…in la tardes o la mañana? He couldn’t tell in the artificially lit and windowless room.

  “A severe concussion, twenty stitches in total, from the left temple to the center of his forehead, and several broken ribs,” the doctor repeated from the chart, and then Zack faded away again.

  *

  “He needs more. And I won’t leave until he gets it.” He woke again to a woman’s shrill voice.

  He half opened then squinted his eyes. “Lights,” he murmured.

  “More light? Just open your eyes more, sweetheart.”

  Stephanie Rine?

  “Off. Lights off.” His head throbbed. Where was he? He had recalled his mother’s voice. Where was she? Was he left floating in a void, left with just Stephanie-fucking-Rine to hover over him?

  Isabel! Where is Isabel? Fuck it hurts to breathe. Had she texted? Is she here?

  “Hello. I’m Doctor Acharya. Can you tell me your name?”

  “Me llamo Zachary James.” Zack looked confused. His words were out of his control. “Por qué…?”

  “It’s fine, Zack, don’t be too worried. With such a trauma, speaking a foreign language, eating with the wrong hand, things like that may happen during your recovery from time to time.”

  Forcing his brain, Zack stammered, “How…long was I…out? Qué día es hoy…I mean, what day…today?”

  “It’s Wednesday. You were out for three days, Zack. You were in an extremely severe car accident. In fact, you’re not only tremendously lucky to be alive, but you are lucky to be able to talk, to move your limbs, to be conscious right now! After seeing the photos of your vehicle, it’s all downright…miraculous, son. Just a laceration to the head and several broken ribs.”

  “It hurts…to breathe. Hablar…to talk,” Zack rasped.

  “Don’t strain yourself, sweetie,” Stephanie soothed with an unsolicited pat on his arm. Zack flinched slightly, but moaned in pain from the minor bit of movement.

  The doctor continued. “Yes, and it will hurt for some time. The button by your right hand is for the morphine drip, to alleviate the pain. And the button below that is for immediate assistance from the nurses’ station.”

  “Dóndez está, I mean, where’s Mom? I heard her. And Isabel? I need Isabel.”

  He heard Stephanie sneer and then excuse herself from the room, telling the doctor in a huff that she would send Zack’s mother in.

  “Zack, your healing time will be some weeks for those broken ribs, and I’ll take your head sutures out in fourteen days.” The doctor nodded, pleased. “For now, just get some rest. You’ll be out of here in two or three days so…soak up the service.” The man chuckled, then went to leave.

  “Esperas! The phone? Can I talk from my phone…someone?”

  “Best to rest now, but here’s your mother. Maybe she can communicate something for you.”

  *

  “It’s really hard to hear you, Amy… What about Zack? Because he didn’t return my text, I’d been wondering—”

  Amy’s garbled ranting cut off her words, then her breath.

  Her phone slipped from her fingers and dropped to the floor, bouncing several times while she could only stare at it. As if it was possessed. Pick it up. Talk to Amy. There’s nothing new here, Isabel. Inevitable torture, remember?

  Robotically, she grabbed the phone with a quivering hand and brought the now cracked screen up to her ear.

  “Amy? Are you there?”

  “No, it’s Darren, Isabel… Can you hear me? Cell reception…not…best…first stop…now.”

  “I hear you now! Darren—how? And, when?”

  Darren began to explain Sunday’s sequence of events to her as she remained surprisingly calm, collected.

  Until he told her that the accident had happened after leaving her house.

  *

  Jolting sobs erupted from her, and she dropped to her knees on the cold tile floor. The hard shock to her kneecaps physically reverberated through her, but the pain didn’t register at all.

  “Are you there, Isabel?” Darren’s voice echoed in her head.

  Was she? Was she really there? Or here? Again? Fuck! And fuck fate. She knew and ignored and now would face the fucking consequences, the loss, the heartbreak. All-the-fuck over again.

  “God, I’m not sure if she’s still on,” she heard Darren say.

  She somehow brought her desperate gasps to smaller, hardly audible whimpers. And then found her voice. “Sorry, I’m here. Darren I can hear you.” The voice of a hollow ghost drifted out of her mouth. Just an unrecognizable, raspy hush.

  “Isabel, he’s going to be alright. Really.”

  Darren had no clue. “Right, of course, I just—” She was about to lose it again, so she just quit speaking.

  Darren somehow took his cue and went on. “He told me to call you, Isabel. Made me promise to get you down there to see him. He needs to talk to you. He needs you there. St. Maria’s, Room 303.”

  She heard the shakiness in Darren’s voice then. Pained emotion being held back by all the courage the newly married man could muster. Zack was Darren’s surrogate father. What the fuck had she done? How could she have been so selfish? All to fulfill her own lust, and to reverse her own loneliness. Zack was almost gone because of her! Damn you, Isabel!

  “I’m a world away, Isabel, and I can’t get to him for at least three days. He’s always been there for me, and I’m…look, it doesn’t matter. The selfless fucker made me promise not to come back from the honeymoon! And it turns out, Isabel, it isn’t me he wants to see anyway—it’s you, only you! Please…will you go?”

  She said nothing as her emotions got the better of her again. She took a deep breath and found her voice. “I will. Of course I’ll go see him.”

  Darren sighed relief into the fuzzy phone connection. “Isabel, listen, separate from how he treats my mother and me, Zack’s been a narcissistic prick for, like, his entire adult life. But he’s changed. I noticed it when I got to Vallarta. But now, with this accident, it’s extreme. Like, I’ve called him the luckiest bastard in the world since
forever, and it always pissed him off. But when he was on the phone with me only ten minutes ago, he called himself ‘blessed’ and ‘the luckiest man in the universe’! And said that you, Isabel, you’re his ‘lucky charm.’ That kind of talk from my brother’s mouth, unheard of. Completely, just, unreal!”

  She didn’t know what the hell to say or what to think. But a skeptic turning believer didn’t make the near death of Zack any less real. Or any less her damn fault!

  “Darren, I’ll go there now. Let me hang up with you and get on the road. You and Amy just try your best to relax and be with each other. I’ll tell Zack you send your love,” she said quickly. “And I’ll talk to you both soon.”

  She hung up and dried her eyes, then switched into high intensity mode, grabbing her keys, phone, and bag. She looked at her unconscious, hardly legible scribble on the border of the old newspaper on her coffee table to recall the hospital room number and then bolted out of the house.

  CHAPTER 48

  She got out of the elevator into the waiting room. She walked past the evil glares of Stephanie and Annette Rine, and the subtle and muted greetings of the remaining friends in the wedding party who must have extended their stay in light of the accident.

  Isabel looked for the nurse’s desk. A wall sign directed her beyond the waiting room through a set of heavy electronic doors. She took a breath, then quickened her pace, because if she didn’t, she’d lose her nerve altogether––she was certain that the red illuminated exit sign behind her was summoning. Loudly buzzing her name.

  As she approached the nurse’s desk, she saw an older woman leaning over the counter talking to the nurse. Isabel came upon them quietly as not to interrupt, but within five feet, the woman turned around.

  Zack’s mother, Elaine, a relieved smile spreading wide across her tired face. “Oh God, thank you. Isabel dear, you’ve come. Darren called and told me you were on your way, but, oh goodness, here you are, and…I am just so glad to see you, and meet you,” the woman said with welling tears in her weary eyes. And on the next breath, Elaine had Isabel tight in her grasp and wouldn’t let go.

  A strange, morphing minute went by. Feelings of guilt, then sheer sympathy, on to oozing warmth filled Isabel’s chest until, finally, she surrendered to the woman’s embrace. Almost against her will, though. This was Zack’s mother. She couldn’t have him, she couldn’t have his mother, she could have none of it.

  And what made it worse, Zack had told her so much about Elaine, such tender stories, Isabel felt like she already knew and, God, even loved the woman. Zack’s mother was holding Isabel as if she were the woman’s own daughter.

  Dear God, this is too much, too hard.

  Isabel began pulling away, trying to unlatch, to separate from the wholehearted woman.

  But Elaine took control. She slid her hands down Isabel’s arms, and held her firmly at the elbows. Then she looked Isabel dead in the face. “Isabel. My precious boy has found his heart in you,” she said. “He’s alive because of you! He almost left us, but fought his way back for you. To be with you! Thank heaven for you, my dear Isabel. Just thank heaven.” Elaine James hugged her again, clutching Isabel to her even harder this time. And then Elaine released her grasp, and kissed Isabel on the forehead. “He’s waiting, dear. Oh he’s been waiting and waiting. Go to him.” She turned to the charge nurse behind the desk. “Maria, this is the one. My Zack’s Isabel.”

  “Hello, Isabel,” the nurse said with a tender smile to match Elaine’s. “Please sign in here and I’ll take you right back to him.”

  Please, no. “Okay, thanks.” Her pulse filled her throat as she signed the form. The nurse stood to take her to Zack. There was no turning back now, and she’d promised Darren.

  Elaine patted Isabel’s hand and nodded. “I will see you shortly, dear.”

  Oh, how Isabel wished she would see Elaine shortly, or ever again. God, how she wished.

  *

  Isabel went with the nurse, while Elaine made her way back to the waiting room through the automatic doors.

  And through those slow opening and closing doors, she heard a familiar crowing, Stephanie’s loud, shrill voice, her hike in volume maybe even for Isabel’s benefit.

  “Rumor has it that she’s killed four husbands. She’s like a real-life witch! Bad juju! The Mexi room service girl at the resort confirmed it! And then she almost kills Zack! I could kill her myself!”

  Used to such talk, Isabel tuned out the noise, even though, ironically, every word the crazy woman uttered was true. It strengthened her, in fact, to keep moving toward Zack. She had to save him from herself.

  “Just this way,” the nurse said. Isabel followed the woman to the door of the next wing, and just before entering, she could hear another voice from the waiting room, one even louder than Stephanie’s.

  “Stephanie Rine, you’re just a stupid, insecure…hussy!”

  Elaine? The nurse, Maria, looked at Isabel as if she’d read Isabel’s mind, and nodded. Yes, it was indeed Zack’s mother. The electronic security doors shut, blocking any other delicious reprimand Elaine may have delivered. Isabel smiled, a tiny burst of justice leaked into her heart. She lifted her chin and let the feeling fill her chest.

  But as soon as she looked down the long white gleaming hallway ahead of her, the burst fizzled to dust.

  “The room is just at the end of this hall,” said Maria, waving Isabel on.

  Isabel wanted to sprint the other way. She wasn’t ready. She needed time. So much more time. If only the long, sterile hallway in front of her could have stretched miles more, taken forever to walk down. But it didn’t. In fact, her feet had already carried her to the room door, as if unconsciously and absolutely against her will.

  The nurse opened Zack’s door, but Isabel stood back against the corridor wall, unable to move or think or breathe. Breathe, in and out, Isabel. Then one last tight breath in and a choking, choppy breath out and she was ready, but not really at all, for what would be her official and final goodbye.

  CHAPTER 49

  His head pounded, while his nausea was controlled only by his fear of leaning over, because leaning or bending, even breathing, inevitably resulted in shattering pain throughout his fragile rib cage. He pressed the morphine button and immediately relaxed, closing his eyes, thankful for the slightest relief.

  “Mr. James,” the nurse whispered. “She’s here.”

  He willed his lids open against the heavy morphine daze, and then forced his eyes to come into focus.

  A flood of déjà vu. Although he knew this was her first physical visit to his hospital room, he was sure that the vision that stood at his bedside, this bronze angel in white flowing silk scarves, had been right there watching over him during his entire hospital stint. “Isabel,” he murmured. “Isabel.”

  He felt a strained pressure through his entire spinal column just having his head rotated an inch, trying to keep his gaze on her, but he took care of it with another click of the button. His mouth and throat were desert-dry, so instead of trying to form sound just yet, he held out his hand for her to take.

  “I am so, so sorry,” she sighed, then he heard and saw her swallow, her emotion tripping down the smooth column of her throat.

  Oh don’t be sad, my angel. But he still couldn’t get words out.

  She took his hand in her own and squeezed hard. “I knew…and I told you! Here’s our glimpse, Zachary James. I just couldn’t take it if you had…” Tears streamed down her silken cheeks now. He wanted so badly to reach over and wipe her tears and all her sadness away. But he couldn’t even sigh without stabbing pain.

  “But…I’m right here,” he managed to scratch out from his parched throat.

  He had so much to say to her, but first he pointed his finger to the side table where a lone cup of water stood, a straw bent over its edge. She brought it to his mouth, he pulled a few sips. Between the shallow incline of his pillow and a small bubble of air getting into the straw, he coughed on the last gulp, and his
roar of pain startled Isabel, and the water spilled down the side of the bed.

  The charge nurse flew in. Zack was holding his sides with his crossed arms, as if his skeleton would just collapse, bones falling limp to the mattress if he didn’t keep himself together. He could see Isabel out of the corner of his eye—she looked terrified, her back flat against the room wall. He couldn’t stand to see her fear, her dread that he’d reduce to ashes from a goddamn cough. But again, he was here. At least he was alive and here.

  The nurse increased the incline on the automatic bed, brought in a new cup of water with a lid, and cleaned up the small spill at his bedside.

  “All good?” she asked.

  Zack blinked yes while Isabel nodded, relaxing her expression and her shoulders just a bit as she returned to Zack’s side.

  “I hate that you’re in so much pain.” She took his hand again.

  His voice cracked to a start as he wove his fingers into hers. “With this button here, I’m just fine.” He smiled, hitting it again.

  Then he cleared his throat with a tiny grimace. “My mom, you met her?”

  “Yes. Yes I met her. Very sweet woman.” She gave him a warm yet distant smile.

  “Just wish I could’ve seen the look…the look in her eyes. She must be in love. Like I am–—” Then a small start of a cough interrupted his words and sent pain through his middle. She got him more water, and after a few sips, he pushed the cup away.

  He was ready to tell her what he’d been dying to say.

  He took a painfully deep breath. “Isabel…the doctor, he actually used the word ‘miraculous’! It’s a miracle that I’m alive. And I see now, I have seen!” He flinched from the slight excitement of his words, but signaled for another drink and was ready to go again, now in a slow whisper. “I’m so lucky,” his raspy voice confessed. “I’m the most… the most fortunate man in the universe. And you…you’re the one who brought me back. My God, I have so much…to tell you, Isabel. But”—he smiled—“it will probably take our entire lives for me…to explain it all. They say I was in a coma for three days, but where I went, there was no”—he swallowed and winced—“no such thing as time, Isabel!” he told her in his morphine haze, his voice becoming quieter and quieter, even hard for him to hear. “Just…no such thing as…as…time…”